Psychology Program Presents

Musical Expertise Effects on Attention and Memory: Evidence from Eye Movements

Experts in many fields of visual expertise have the remarkable ability to rapidly
recognize visual patterns from their domain of expertise. Musical expertise provides an
excellent test case for studying how multisensory knowledge representations contribute
to the development of visual expertise. To explore how musical expertise impacts
memory and attention, I will discuss a series of experiments in which the eye
movements of expert and novice musicians were monitored during visual search and
change detection tasks that involved domain-specific visual patterns (i.e., music
scores). Taken together, these studies indicated that expert musicians are faster and
more accurate at processing music stimuli, as shown by faster reaction times, faster
times to the first fixation on a visual search target, and larger saccade amplitudes.
Experts were also less impacted by increases in visual complexity and less impacted by
the presence of auditory distraction (i.e. background music). I will discuss how these
findings fit with theories of learning and expertise, including chunking and template
theories, which assume that experts acquire a large vocabulary of visual patterns over
the course of many hours of practice. I will also discuss ongoing and future work that
integrates EEG and eye tracking methodology (i.e., Eye-EEG co-registration) to further
understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support the development of
expertise.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Location: Preston Theater

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